NVIDIA SHIELD OTA Update & Performance Review

NVIDIA SHIELD PC Gaming Experience

One of the first things I did with the NVIDIA SHIELD when I got my hands on it, was to fire up NVIDIA’s Grid Beta application. The only server that is currently available is in northern California and Chicago is a bit of a hike from there, so they gave a warning about needing a solid internet connection to experience a quality gaming experience. Once the checked my connection, the NVIDIA Grid application loaded up. Being that Grid is still in beta, there are only 14 games up and running on the server, but I’m sure more will be coming in the near future as the server base expands. The games available on the NVIDIA Grid right now include:

Alan Wake American Nightmare

Darksiders

Darksiders 2

Dead Island

Gas Guzzlers: Extreme

Overlord 2

PixelJunk Monsters

Race Driver Grid

Read Faction: Armageddon

Saints Row: The Third

Street Fighter X Tekken

Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Trine 2

I decided to give Dead Island a try, once I selected the game it began loading and after a short time I was ready to play!

Once I was in the game I chose a character and I was good to go! I promptly learned that I am extremely out of practice with a controller! I lost track of time and played Dead Island for a couple of hours (instead of working on my Honey Do list) and never experienced any issues with stuttering or lag that I was expecting playing from a server halfway across the country.

Connecting the NVIDIA SHIELD to a PC through GameStream is incredibly easy to do. Once you’re in the Tegra Zone, scroll down to My PC Games, and then over to the box that says GameStream PCs. Once the GameStream PCs is highlighted, depress the ‘A’ button and it will bring up a list of GeForce enabled PC’s.

Once you click the PC that you would like to connect the shield to it will bring up a PIN for you to enter on your PC.

This is the window that pops up on your PC waiting for you to input your PIN.

Once the PINs have been entered it will bring up a list of the GameStream ready games on your PC. The only issue I ran into here is that the SHIELD didn’t differentiate between the Game of the Year editions and the normal editions of the Batman games. I only have one of each installed and I was occasionally selecting the wrong one. From here you can pick the games that are Game Stream Ready or you can also log into your steam account and give the other games installed on the system a go and see if they will work for you.

I tried to play Battlefield Bad Company 2, unfortunately I couldn’t control the game through the SHIELD, I was able to log into steam successfully and load the game, but was ultimately unplayable.

I was able to load up both of the Batman Games, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City and spend time playing both of them without any issues. You can see the benchmark from Batman Arkham City above completed with an average of 72 frames per second. Though that doesn’t exactly show off the prowess of the SHIELD since it’s my Gaming system rendering the game and streaming it to the SHIELD.

I was also able to load up COD Black OPS II for a little zombie killing action.

The NVIDIA Tegra Zone has a ton of games that you can purchase or are free to play. I played a handful of them and wasted plenty of time enjoying myself and blowing off some steam from a long days work. Unlike playing on my older iPhone 4 there is absolutely no issues playing these games, everything is fluid and enjoyable!

The NVIDIA Tegra Zone features a section that has the latest news that relates to the NVIDIA SHIELD.

I downloaded a handful of games to try out and all of them were easy to play on the 5″ screen and high quality controller.